Black fine line botanical tattoo of a slender sprig with dark leaves and stippled buds on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical sprig on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A slender sprig with several dark, solid leaves and small stippled buds runs diagonally up the upper arm. The thin stems are drawn in fine black linework, while the buds are built from fine dots. The black ink sits on pale skin against a plain, softly lit background, with the tattoo centred in the frame.

Botanical Fine line Dotwork Upper arm Sprig Leaves Stem Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thyme had gone grey by the third week out of Falmouth, but Jonah Peel kept it in its twist of waxed paper all the same, tucked inside the lid of the tea caddy where the salt could not reach it. Nobody aboard the Constance Mary knew what it was for. The cook thought it was for soup. The mate thought it was for a girl.

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Jonah had cut it himself from the bank behind the chapel wall on the morning he signed on, while his mother pretended not to watch from the scullery window. She had said the sea would take what it liked. She had not said what he ought to do with a sprig once it stopped being green, so he decided for himself.

Off the Azores the wind dropped for nine days and the ship lay still as a painted thing. Jonah spent the calms on his knees at the lee rail with a penknife, scraping the stems clean and pressing the leaves between the pages of an old set of navigation tables. The buds were the hard part. He dotted each one with the point of a pen, patient as a clerk, until the sprig looked the way it had on the chapel wall in March.

When the Constance Mary raised the Horn, the captain stopped at the hatch and asked what the boy was drawing. Jonah turned the page so he could see. The captain looked a long while, then said the thyme would keep if it was kept dry. Jonah closed the book on it and went below to read his mother's letter at last, with the pressed sprig lying flat between his fingers like a second page of it.